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Finding A Trade To Make On Thursdays. "Walmart"

I don't like Thursday afternoons in short term option trading. A lot of things seem to happen on Thursdays like government reports coming out. I don't buy in the final seconds of trading, Call options on Boeing, Caterpillar or Eli Lilly or hoping for a Friday morning bounce. The hope today is to do find something good to trade and walk away by early afternoon. Welcome to Walmart. Options on Walmart are tight. Other stocks like McDonalds have options which trade sloppily. Let me show you what I mean by this. Good luck trying to get a fair fill if you're buying or selling. Now the Walmart side of the story on how options trade on it. Can you see the tighter bid and ask and the higher volume of trading? Step back for a second and consider this. The stock is only up $.26 cents in the first 45 minutes of trading. What does that tell us? It's waiting to decide which way it wants to go. Now this. These Call options went on to move up to $1.71 just before noon. There was the...
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Netflix Pulls Off A Monday Morning Rally And Two Back To Back Friday Afternoon Rallies. That Plus My Thoughts On All Of This Action

In a recent blog I talked about Costco taking off upwards on a late Friday afternoon. This time this blog is partly about Netflix resetting itself on a Monday morning. Netflix often makes big moves on Fridays and big moves on Monday mornings. I call it getting rebalanced. Playing the Monday moves is often not as rewarding as playing the one day Friday options because included in the option pricing is a time value component. You are paying for the luxury of five days of trading time. That makes them more expensive.
Can you see a $25.00 morning bounce from it's early morning trading lows?
I call it returning to normal. One week ago I talked about Costco shooting up on a Friday afternoon starting at about 1:30 p.m. I posted a detailed blog about it's incredible jump. Here is the chart I showed before it started to jump up.
Here is how it then closed the day.
Options purchases at 1:45 p.m. which was the period of time I highlighted on the chart paid off on spades at 3:00 p.m., perhaps the best situation I witnessed on the week. My point is Monday mornings and late Friday afternoons are often sweet spots for playng options on this stock. Now yesterdays action on Friday September 19th which carries the same theme. Here is it's one day chart.
Let's image you were lucky enough to be looking at the 1210 series of Calls around 10:15 a.m. That's when this series of Calls was trading at it's lows of the day. Here is how that series of Calls then closed on the day.
The higher up "out-of-the-money" Calls posted even more impressive gains. Here are two examples.
Is it possible for anyone to pinpoint in advance when these types of moves will happen? I think people with a passion for option trading are more in tune with knowing where to look for this kind of action. Look at the upwards jump on Pfizer last week on Wednesday Sept.17th. I did a blog catching it's biggest one morning jump of the week. I showed it's Call option prices just before and just after it's big move. Go back and read that blog if you wish.
Can I teach the world to play options? Not really. I don't want to encourage others to make reckless trades. It's a sea of sharks out there. I can only show you snippets of the action. It remains a continous learning game for everyone.

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